Transactions

In developmental science and developmental psychopathology, transactions signify dynamic processes occurring between individuals and their environments. In transactional models, characteristics of the individual and characteristics of the multiple contexts surrounding the individual are mutually influential, unfolding and reverberating across the life span. Transactions involve complex developmental interchanges, whereby individual and environmental forces work together to forge later life outcomes, often in spiraling fashion. Transactional models are diametrically opposed to reductionistic ideas of the primacy of either (a) genes and biology or (b) parenting and other forms of socialization. Instead, transactional perspectives view development as an unfolding set of interactive processes whereby internal and external forces amplify one another, eventuating in end states that are not predictable from either set of forces alone. This entry defines ...